Design and performance investigation of a coherent optical system based multi-band OFDM with various indexes

Abstract In this work, a comprehensive study of a multi-band optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OOFDM) system is investigated. Different OFDM indexes (128,256,512, and 1024) are utilized with the coherent detection CD technique. High-order modulation 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) is used to obtain high spectral efficiency. Transmission studies indicated that 128 subcarriers with 2-bands exhibit a higher optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of 23 dB with lower bit error rate (BER) of 1 × 10 −4 , while 1024 subcarriers with 8-bands shows a lower OSNR of 22 dB with a higher BER of 3 × 10 −3 . Even though the higher subcarrier type has the lowest BER, it provides a superior solution when combined with wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) in the presence of forward error correction (FEC). The performance of the system with 40 Gbps along 800 km of uncompensated fiber has designed and simulated using Optisystem software.